Monday, July 28, 2014

ONE GOOD REASON

I believe she would have lived
had we given her enough hope for a reason to live. The first sign of old
age—the falling of autumn leaves—oh, the onset of the rotten egg smell of
death— we carted her off to an old-folks home,
loaded her in the back of the pick-up because she wouldn’t fit in the
front, and just as easy as sliding her body into the velvet of a coffin, she
slid her varicose ankles and pickled- pig-looking feet into booties with
paw-print grips on the bottoms and became someone else’s wheel-chaired problem—a
burden we might have to visit but never ever have to carry in our world again.
Our burden-less world had us a coming and a going, paying her visits from time
to time, and those times were never more than five to ten minute increments.
You know:

A brief hello.

Dropping off her favorite buffalo
wings.

Asking how the nurses are
treating her.

Flowers were always a nice touch.

And you’re out of there.

Grandpa used to
say in his best false preacher’s voice, “When you cross that River, when you
enter that place of fire and brimstone, you make it brief.” And to a point I
believe him. Anywhere death has
attempted to disguise itself underneath the smell of cleaners is not an ideal
place to linger. What cleaner would I recommend to cover the smell of death?
None are strong enough. Death clung to our coveralls even once we returned to
the land of the living, clung the way skin clings to a skeleton—there just
isn’t any getting away from it. I suppose that’s why we bury it so deep in the
dirt.

She died within
months. The doctor had given her two to three years to live, said she wasn’t
even sick, just suffering from that darned thing known as old age. But putting
her into that old-folks home was just like starting the timer on that game with
the geometric shapes you have to fit into place before you run out of time and
the pop-up tray scares the shit out of you. She knew the countdown had begun,
but she refused to pick up any of those shapes. She reckoned she would die with
what dignity, or stubbornness, she had left after being dropped off to die, and
by her own family.

Did we feel
guilty? Well we didn’t feel as noble as a mother pelican who will peck at its own
heart to draw the most nutritious blood to feed its starving young, but we
didn’t feel as awful as a male rat who will eat the young, the weak, the dead
or the competition. We felt the worst guilt—that middle guilt—the guilt of
being just human enough—humane, but not a jot or tittle more, as the Bible says.

A feeling like
that gets stuck in your craw, and after a while you have to do something about
it, one way or the other—inhumane or human, it’s the same decision as far as guilt
is concerned. Well, not quite the same.
I tend to think only those who are trying their best to live moral lives feel
guilt. So I guess I’m trying. I bought a granite stone for half price, and put
her name, the dates of birth and death, and this saying on it: “Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they will see God.”

Matthew 5:8

I don’t know just how pure she
had ever been. I don’t even know what she had been like as a child, teenager or
adult. I only knew her as old and stubborn, and as a fan of her college
football team, and as a fan of golf. She loved to watch golf, especially during
the cold of winter. This much I do know. The phrase I chose for her comes from
the Sermon on the Mount, from the mouth of Jesus Christ, and the phrase is
short, and if you have never apprenticed as a chiseler, then understand that is
about as human of an inscription as I could give her. God rest her soul.